A grad school epoch

I just learned about the word "epoch" in my Victorian novel class. We're reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, a once-popular sensation novel of 1850s England. It's divided into three "epochs". So...a grad school epoch it is.

OH my, where to begin? Perhaps with a setting. Living room, parents' home in Nashville. Typing in the darkness on a Mac. Sitting at my sister's school table, a refurbished and rescued-from-the-dumb Vanderbilt library table (so cool!). Throbbing bass notes from the Mexican party up the street. I could really do without those throbbing bass notes at midnight on a Saturday. Having lived in Mexico does not mean I acclimated to their late-night revels.

I've been in school four weeks. A month. I've survived three straight weeks of isolated study, two panic attacks, a journal article summary, a terms test, teaching an undergrad short stories class, six entire books (including Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol...and Freud), weaving back and forth between Clarksville and Nashville on the weeks and weekends. Moving to Clarksville. Trying to put down new roots with my classmates and church groups. Reading, reading, always reading. There will never be an end until December. Research class, Victorian class, psychoanalysis class. Attending a short story class to help teach. Managing an online world lit class. About to start writing a paper due in two weeks. It will never end until December...

But I'm happy. I don't have to dress up in pantyhose, skirts, and look like a Baptist schoolgirl. I don't have to pace the four-foot walls of a faded jungle-green cubicle. I don't have to repress a need for sunshine eight and a half hours a day. I can breathe and live and feel like a real person. I don't even have to get up before eight o'clock, any day of the week. I'm making friends--real ones, the kind that last beyond in-class lectures, presentations, and after-class chats. I can find a hundred places to go where I won't be disturbed. My room is a refuge. I have a down duvet on my bed, the kind I longed for from Germany to London this summer.

The one penultimate thing I have learned the past four weeks is that I have to change the way I study. I started thinking I could just talk to people after I finished studying. But...somehow, I was never done studying! I would go to my living room and shut the door and read, and read, and...read...and I would get more and more depressed as the to-do list crept further and further down the planner page, like soldiers marching to an unforeseen battle site. My soldiers are just going to have to keep marching, whether I can mark them off on the day assigned or not.

I love these weekends at home. I feel so safe here with my mom and dad. I feel so cultured here, where I can hop in the car and drive down to see a play at Centennial Park, attend a folk festival, or head to my favorite coffee shop. And of course my friends, my "core," are here. It's refreshing. But I'm starting to look forward to going back to Clarksville on Monday. Each week is starting to be a gold mine.

Oh no, I just remembered that I should be typing my essay on Jane Eyre right now. I haven't even formed a thesis. It's due in two weeks, but I must submit a draft or risk a low grade--which is unacceptable in grad school.

Farewell, dear reader, as Charlotte Brontë writes, until another midnight moment when the writing bug bites me.

Kite Runner

As I type on a German keyboard--which switches the Z and Y, by the way--in the living room of my Swiss friend's apartment, rain falls gently on green leaves outside. A cloudy, slightly dismal sky doesn't spark a panic attack as one at home in Tennessee might, because I was traumatized by a tornado there earlier this year. Being in Europe is good for that, at least--I can relax about the weather.

Tomorrow Misty and I are off to the Alps before riding the rails south to Milano. We used to be excited about Italy, until we met France on its own terms for two weeks. Boy does that country do a number on its American tourists! Anyway, we fear the potentially less-than-industrailized and crowded aspects of the streets of Italy's cities will be like the ones we encountered in France; culture shock, is what I refer to.

But I digress. I came to discuss the impact of the film "Kite Runner" on my heart this afternoon. True, Misty and I are probably watching too many movies on our long vacation. But what story-loving, homebody American who misses home wouldn't? You excuse me for this, I'm sure. Plus two months of travel makes one tired.

The central event of this film is not the remove to America of the main character, as one might expect. It's not even the brutal Russian invasion. It is the rape of a little boy by his bully peer. Where a secluded 15-year-old bully would get the idea to rape a boy nearly his own age I don't know, except by a deeply depraved parentage. At any rate, this event shook me to depths of my soul--disturbed that lurking dragon of passion I talked about before--and was not satisfied by the ensuing results. The main character internalizes his shame at having witnessed this event and turned tail; rather than standing up in honor, he tries to dismiss the servant boy, who turns out to have been his half brother (which he doesn't discover until he is an adult), through devious means.

The ending, however, gives Amir the opportunity he needs to redeem his heinous act of cowardice. What a moment for catharsis! He teaches the son of his half brother, whom he rescues from sexual enslavement in the depths of a Taliban encampment, how to fly a kite. When Amir "cuts" the opposing kite, he offers to "run" for it--that is, chase down the severed kite as a prize. This is the act that got Hassan raped. As boys, Hassan had offered to chase down the defeated kite with the phrase, "For you, a thousand times over." The boys never spoke the same to each other again. But Amir redeems this moment...when he goes to chase down the kite in Golden Gate Park, he turns to Hassan's son and calls, "For you, a thousand times over!"

What a moment for retribution and making things right! But this movie revealed something to me, deeper than what I saw on the screen. It is the injustice of the globe...and how I have forgotten about it. Man, did that passion dragon stir through my tears! I am seriously ready to jump on the make-Afghanistan-a-better-place bandwagon. It also made me think of Iran. These nations share a similar past, as related to me in Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. It is the story of her childhood when the Taliban took over Iran and her subsequent escape to France. Satrapi spoke at my university once, but I wasn't on campus for the lecture. When I read that novel in my children's lit class, I remember a similar sensation rising me, one of extreme longing for justice in the earth. I mean, I don't know what I can do. I have no history with those cultures. Maybe it's not even about what I can "do," maybe it's about what I can be for them. I can stand for righteousness. I can stand in the face of death for my fellowmen when the moment arises. I'm tired of the cowardly tendencies in me, the self-preservation that I run to in tense moments.

"Kite Runner" makes me want to stand for righteousness and justice, to not be one of those silent men who allow evil to pass and therefore contribute to it. Even if I die. The noble part of me, that is what is stirred by Amir's cowardice and his father's courage. Who knows what opportunities for justice will arise on the next leg of my journey. I pray I will stand.

P.S. Ich Liebe Dich

In a little village in northeastern Switzerland, in a living room with two friends, a story stirred my heart.

I don't know where to begin. I'm not Irish, but I just left Ireland a month ago. I wear a claddagh ring on my right ring finger, so perhaps the film's Irishness resounds in my heart. Perhaps it is the pain in Holly's story that highlights old wounds in me.

I don't mean to be melodramatic. I have suffered enough at the hands of melodrama, enough to satiate the senses of any teenage sap. I'll try to steer clear of such murky waters...admittedly whilst navigating a virtual minefield of the same. Ah well.

When my nature is deeply touched by a story--and I feed it diligently, so opportunities are rife--a need to express, erupting out of me, is only quenched to my harm. Even now I have cast off good roommate behavior by typing in the middle of the kitchen while my friends clean and prepare lunch around me. I don't know what I need to express though--is it sadness, fear, grief, longing? Is it all these things? Is it latent hope? Dreams that are easier to bear if they lie lifeless in the bottom of my soul like forgotten cargo in the belly of a merchant steamship? (Oops, I slipped in for a moment!)

To be honest, that's a little what it feels like: an aching longing that usually sleeps in the bottom of me, stirring a little as though nudged and sending weak moans upward to the ears of an anxious mother. I am the mother. Sometimes I picture this substance as a type of small dragon, like the one in a storybook my mother would read me when I was a girl. It is about a dragon whom nobody would acknowledge even though it grew larger with each denial of its existence. Finally it is so big that the house perches on its back like a turtle's shell and he walks about the city. When the parents acknowledge the dragon, he shrinks, and all is happily ever after. My dragon, he wakes up when I watch too many movies or read too many stories. And if I don't let out the longing somehow (thus today's voyage into melodrama), it grows and grows into an insatiable beast.

What is the longing, the substance, the dragon? He is made of many things--hopes; dreams; the sublime; an oversoul, if you like Transcendental terminology. The longing for dreams to be fulfilled. When I saw Holly's absolutely impossible dream that had been fulfilled--a man who would not treat her as her father did--be ripped from her by an injustice of the Fall (a brain tumor), it seemed something more than I could bear. She survived by his patient understanding of her nature. But...how would I survive that? How did I survive that?

I think I identify more with Kathy Bates in this tale, the mother embittered by her husband's early abandonment of the family. I remember Sue Ellen Cole, a mentor from my childhood with whom I reconnected as a young adult, affirming me when she she said that abandonment is worse than death because the one who died didn't choose to go. That's kind of what Kathy Bates says to her daughter when Holly disqualifies her father's abandonment.

My sister Lydia said she cried all the way through this film because the story is about something being ripped from Holly, and she has experienced that ripping.

I too have experienced ripping, but somehow this is not what affects me about "PS I Love You." It's more...it is more that Gerry challenged Holly to go discover what she is good at and helped her through the process in his letters. What love! I think this is because I too know there is greatness in me, a greatness that will "separate me from all other people." The thing that makes me different. I still don't know what it is, and I just turned 26. I know this is yet young--I do, I know this! I put a pressure on myself, though, to have hit upon the genius in me that will change the world.

Holly finds herself in creating beautiful shoes, forgiving her father (I hope), and letting Gerry go. Where will I find myself? In writing a thesis in grad school? In living on my own and gardening? In marrying? Not even Holly had found herself in marriage. It wasn't until she needed something fun to do with her life, alone, that she found out she could make shoes.

I need Jesus to shine through me in the special color of the part of the prism of Him that I am. I need to know Him, and I want the greatness to come because of knowing Him. I have lost, like Kathy Bates' character, and I have lost a friend (Aly West) the way Holly lost Gerry. But in spite of the pain and the longing which is stirred up and consequently hurts too, I want to live.

PS, I love you. Thanks for telling me this Jesus. And thank you that loving others is part of You shining through me.

An Irish life for me!

Hello to the world of those who found my blog and hoped to be updated upon its cliff-edged pages!

Alas, blogging has never been my strong suit, and many travels have already come to pass. Misty and I have been kicking back our figurative chairs in Ireland for almost a week now, living with a lovely family just on the the southern edge of Dublin. It's really a village named Greystones.

We have seen a few things--the sights of London (I didn't for I was sick with a cold), the cottages of the Cotswolds, a manor house called Burghley House (and the set for Lady Catherine de Burgh's home in the latest "Pride & Prejudice"), a day in Cambridge, then off to Scotland for the Edinburgh Castle and Arthur's Seat, and now in Ireland for the valley of the monasteries aka Glendalaugh (pronounced glen-dough-lock) and the site of the Robert Moore poem "The Meeting of the Waters," as well as a bike tour through Itish countryside.

Please see our facebook pages for more of the views through photos and videos--add me if you haven't: www.facebook.com/sally.boyce

And visit my youtube page for all the videos: www.youtube.com/user/sallyjean722

I'm off to build some omelettes for our host family the Warnocks. It's a lovely land and trip we have found ourselves in. :)

Welcome...

...to Project Hope:Dream, a virtual land of promise.

Two young dreamers, dissatisfied with living the status quo as college student and post-student, want to make a difference in the world. How can two young women, living seemingly powerless existences as part of the North American system, make a splash in the ocean of hopeless humanity?

By telling stories. That's right, we are storytellers--in song, in writing, and in life.

The beginning of our journey finds us backpacking and Couchsurfing across post-industrial Eruope, scouring the islands and the Continent for hopeless dreamers. Once we find them, these disillusioned--and some illusioned, too, I'm sure--will tell Misty Boyd and Sally Boyce (no, we're not sisters) their stories...their dreams.

And we two, we simple American two, will post their stories in writing, video, and photographs, for all the world to see.

We HOPE that our readers will be inspired to action by hearing these stories. We HOPE to connect America with Europe over dreams, not differences. We HOPE to take our readers along with us into the lives of the forgotten, the looked-over, the average European...and then we HOPE that our readers and interviewees will alike DREAM--together even.

Stay tuned for an epic adventure May 18-August 10, 2011.

Project Hope:Dream...come, hope and dream with us.